Saturday, December 16, 2017

Robert Lancaster worked on improving PHD2 support with Ekos. This includes retrieving the guide star image, drift errors and RMS values, among other minor improvements and refactoring of the Ekos PHD2 codebase to support future extensions.

Furthermore, Robert added drift plot support to Ekos Guide module which provides a visual indication of the accuracy of the guiding.

The Ekos Guide module received further improvements to make it more straightforward to use with end users. The calibration button is now removed and performed automatically whenever guiding starts. The user can clear the calibration at any time to restart the process.

Meridian Flip support improved with various fixes to post-meridian-flip operations including autofocus. Filter Manager received several fixes to improve filter switching during various phases of the capture process. Users can also control when to run the In-Sequence focus check. By default, the check is executed after each frame, but now can be configured to be executed only after several frames are captured.

A minor but quite useful addition is the Meridian Line. It can be turned on so that users can get a visual indication on how close the mount is to executing a meridian flip procedure.

Enjoy the new release, and do not forget to report any bugs or suggestions over at bugs.kde.org.

Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Another minor KStars release is now available for Linux, MacOS, & Windows. KStars 2.8.7 brings several bug fixes and new improvements!

So what's new in this release?

Sounds! While KDE users on Linux enjoyed sound notifications since they were introduced in KStars, users on non-KDE desktop and on other OSes couldn't get the sounds. This is now fixed by using Phonon & libVLC. There is a known issue with the sounds being abruptly cut-off under MacOS, we are investigating this bug.

Fixed annoying issue with slightly incompatible frame sizes for DSLR captures. The frame size is now always subframed to the maximum resolution entered by the user when using a DSLR for the first time in Ekos.

GPS fixes: When a new GPS location is received, KStars will now explicitly changes the current location to GPS Location. The time is also updated accordingly with the GPS UTC & Offset values.

Fixed orientation of solved Align frames. Now all solved images shall rotate correctly in the KStars Sky Map to reflect the orientation of the captured image.

Thursday, October 5, 2017

So here comes another minor release for KStars v2.8.5 just less than two weeks after 2.8.4 was released. KStars v2.8.5 is available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. In addition to the usual bug-fixing and enhancements, here are a couple of useful features for our users:

1. Log Manager

Users complained over the year that it was hard to get logs for Ekos & INDI to diagnose issues. Due to the complexity of Ekos & INDI, logs are absolutely necessary in order to diagnose any issues. With 2.8.5, it's now super easy to enable logs and they're all in one place. From the Ekos Summary screen, click logs to open the Log Manager and then select which specific Ekos module and/or INDI driver you want to diagnose. Start Ekos as you normally do and then all the logs are stored locally, even if you are using remote INDI drivers!

2. Filter Manager

While users were able to select filter focus offsets in previous version of KStars, it was only applicable in the capture module. Not only that, you were limited to locking a specific filter when running the focus module, but what if you need to lock the filter depending on what current filter is in use? What if you don't need to run autofocus on filter change for all filters, but specific ones? The Filter Manager is here to resolves these issues.

My primary motivation behind this is due to my recent imaging session with IC5070. I wanted to use Luminance filter as the locked filter for both Lum and Hydrogen-Alpha, and when using OIII/SII, I wanted Ekos to keep the current filter and focus with it. With the old system, you were limited to one locked filter for everything, but now it is much more versatile and configurable. Please test away and report any bugs to KDE Bugtracking system.

Saturday, September 23, 2017

Less than two weeks after the release of KStars 2.8.3 comes another minor bugfix release. Download KStars 2.8.4 for Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

Major highlights:

Robert Barlow submitted a patch to add elevation information for all cities. The information was built from Google data. It closes Bug #382462. The elevation data is also now sent to the INDI drivers.

Stars and Deep Sky Objects labels are now zoom-dependent so they appear larger when zoomed in which improves usability.

Rotators are now fully tested and supported with Ekos capture and align module. In Ekos align module, use Load & Slew to go to any arbitrary target, and then have your rotator exactly match the orientation of the target in the image!

Fixed several issues with internationalization of some strings discovered by Khalid AlAjaji. Khalid also submitted significant translations for KStars in Arabic!

Jérôme Sonrier submitted a fresh new updated Daylight Saving rules. He is also working on getting rid of the static TZ rules in KStars and using the ones provided by the system.

Fixed bug in processing Load&Slew data when some keywords are missing.

Fix layout issues for RTL languages.

This release is dedicated to Juli, my lovely German Shepard companion for the last 7 years. She is accompanied here by Tommy when he was just a small puppy back then. Long live and prosper my good girl!

Monday, September 11, 2017

The bugfix release of KStars 2.8.3 is available for all major platforms (Note: MacOS version is delayed to 2017-09-13). In this version, we finally managed to release translations for Windows & MacOS users, thanks to the efforts of Hannah and Kevin over at Craft, and the KDE translation team.

KStars in Arabic

A major bug that was fixed is inaccurate asteroid and comets positions. After exhaustive troubleshotting with the aid of JPL Horizon ephemeris, the problem was traced to imprecise Earth ecliptic longitude angle. The Earth coordinates are important if we want to calculate positions of solar system bodies from a geocentric point of view. Valentin traced the problem to problematic VSOP87 files and promptly generated new data files that solves the discrepancy in Earth ecliptic longitude.

However, while that greatly improved the accuracy, it was still a bit off. While checking KStars Florence (1981 ET3) asteroid position against that of Stellarium, I noted KStars epoch of date position exactly match the J2000 position reported in Stellarium! This was not a coincidence, it turns out we didn't account for precession in KStars. After that is taken care of, the comet and asteroid positions are now accurate on the order of arc-seconds! This is a 100-fold improvement in accuracy from previous versions.

Several fixes and improvement to Ekos with fixes in PHD2 support along with the ability to disable streaming from remote cameras right from the guide module. Another issue that was resolved is the focus module always running autofocus even when the HFR is below the threshold. This was tricky to trace down as it was due to a switch of HFR algorithms when the HFR check is first requested. For those using domes, the align module now properly waits until a slaved dome reaches its target before proceeding with image capture. More over, the Mosaic Tool was simplified and now dragging the mosaic grid produces precise jobs for all orientations.

Numerous stability improvements from GSoC 2017 projects made it into the release. GSoC 2017 student Csaba Kertesz concluded the project and KStars is now much more bullet-proof than before.

This release is named after my lovely loyal German Shepard Tommy! Isn't he a good boy?

Thursday, August 24, 2017

With the KStars "Hipster" 2.8.1 release, I introduced Hierarchical Progressive Survey (HiPS) in KStars with three sample catalogs in the optical, infrared, and gamma regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Now users can browse from hundreds of online HiPS surveys and can enable them for overlay in KStars. Everything from radio, infrared, optical up to gamma rays is available along with a short description on each survey of interest.

Since these surveys literally take hundreds of gigabytes of storage space, they are downloaded on-demand and stored in a local cache. The disk cache is set by default to consume 1 GB while the RAM cache is set to 300 MB. These settings are now configurable from the HiPS Settings to provide users the flexibility to balance system resources with catalog usage.

By default, overlays utilize nearest neighbor algorithm to map 2D images unto the celestial sphere. Drawing of HiPS overlays can be further improved by enabling Bilinear Interpolation at the expense of increased CPU usage.

These selections shall be available in the next KStars 2.8.2 release coming up soon.

Thursday, August 17, 2017

The highlight for this release is experimental support for HiPS: Hierarchical Progressive Surveys. HiPS provides multi-resolution progressive surveys to be overlayed directly in client applications, such as KStars. It provides an immersive experience as you can explore the night sky dynamically.

With over 200+ surveys across the whole electromagnetic spectrum from radio, infrared, visual, to even gamma rays, the user can pan and zoom progressively deeper into the data visually.

HiPS Support in KStars

HiPS support in KStars has been made possible with collaboration with the excellent open source planetarium software SkyTechX. This truely demonstrates the power of open source to accelerate development and access to more users.

Another feature, also imported from SkyTechX, is the Polaris Hour Angle, which is useful for users looking to polar align their mount.

Polar Hour Angle

GSoC 2017 student Csaba Kertész continued to merge many code improvements. Moreover, many bugs fixes landed in this release. The following are some of the notable fixes and improvements:

Tuesday, July 25, 2017

This is a minor bugfix release to increase stability of KStars on all supported platforms. Nevertheless, there were few significant updates:

Default NGC/IC catalog is now replaced by OpenNGC project. Christian Dersch compiled this catalog from OpenNGC. KStars now include more objects with accurate positions!

Lots of C++11/C++14 code migration work by GSoC 2017 student Csaba Kertész. This also included memory management clean-up, usage of smart pointers, valgrind suppression file and other fixes.

Adding support to selection of telescopes from Ekos equipment profile directly. This facilitates having different profiles when utilizing different telescopes on the same mount.

Michael Fulbright, KStars & INDI latest developer,
added the ability to have a scheduled refocus every N minutes during a capture sequence. Michael also added dither size in pixels and dither timeout to UI.

Many small bugs were fixed, thanks to our users who are making use of KDE Bug Tracking facilities effectively.

This is mostly a bugfix release where we concentrated on fixing bugs as reported by our users. But that didn't stop us from creating new tools that were long requested by the community, including the Mount Control tool that facilitates motion and GOTO commands with a simple interface.

On the other hand, KStars GSoC 2017 project started with lots under the hood work taking place. Csaba went full throttle with migrating the C++ code to modern C++14 standards while updating the build process to be stricter, more secure, and efficient. The whole code base was formatted and countless warnings resolved. Furthermore, several enhancements were made to decrease memory usage and increase performance of tools such as Observation Planner.

For KStars Lite on Android, it now supports Automatic Mode where you can identify stars, planets, and constellations simply by pointing the phone toward the sky and looking at the live Sky Map within the App. Significant performance gains were made in FITS files that support WCS data. Since processing WCS is very CPU intensive, loading WCS data is now performed on demand. This is especially important for embedded devices where resources are limited.

Robert Lancaster implemented automatic download of Astrometry.net index files directly from the GUI. No longer the user have to go and hunt for index files, calculate FOVs for different equipment...etc. With the updated system, all the required index files are highlighted automatically by Ekos, and all you have to do is to click and download them!

Special thanks to all those who made this release possible. Outstanding work from KDE's Craft team, led by Hannah Von Reth, for making this great tool that enables KStars to reach users across all major platforms.

Monday, May 8, 2017

In this release, Robert Lancaster dedicated a lot of time to improving KStars What's Interesting Tool (WIT). It is now significantly improved and offers a rich educational experience to explore the heavens! Users can now explore many naked eye and deep sky objects, in addition to addon catalogs offered by KStars such as the Sharpless Catalog.

Users wishing to have more fine control on what objects to observe and/or image should be using the Observation Planner that enable filtering of objects with custom constraints and limits. For casual users looking to find out what's interesting tonight, then this tool is the optimal choice.

Whether you're simply viewing the sky unaided with your eye or using binoculars/telescopes, find out which objects are available and how to locate them in the night sky.

The WIT fetches images and information on the objects and interest and can even fetch information from online sources like Wikipedia.

Mac Canon users will be glad to know the new release now enables them to fully control their DSLRs under OSX. Furthermore, the Mac release includes support for ZWO ASI cameras. We hope to add support for QHY for Mac in the next release.

Access to thousands of images like this

While KStars includes downloadable addons for images that appears in the detail dialog, John Sadler did a fantastic job of compiling images for over 18,000 NGC/IC objects!! These images are now available as downlodable addons, and now you can enjoy images of thousands of objects right within KStars. A small update to the Observation Planner enabled support for viewing images in there as well to help you plan what to observe and image ahead.

A few fixes were made to the Ekos Guide module to detect timeout in image captures and to take appropriate actions before giving up. Also, dithering failure does not necessary lead to autoguiding process failure. This behavior is now controlled by the user. By default, the autoguide process shall proceed even if dithering fails for whatever reason.

Finally, I added SkySafari support to INDI and now SkySafari users can enjoy using their app & KStars simultaneously to control their equipment without resorting to exotic hacks.

Thursday, March 23, 2017

In this release, we introduce the Ekos Mount Modelling tool developed by Robert Lancaster. It's currently in Beta now and we would appreciate any feedback. The tool enables you to build a comprehensive mount model if supported by your mount. Any mount that improves its internal pointing model after a SYNC command is applicable. Furthermore, INDI mounts that supports INDI Alignment Subsystem (EQMod, Nexstarevo, Synscan..etc) are also applicable.

Along with the advanced mount modelling tool comes the new Solution Results plot in the Align Module. It displays the quality of your GOTO after each solve and it can help you to identify if there are issues with your mount or the quality of the image..etc.

You can zoom, pan, and drag to explore the plot in details. Annotation for the quality of each GOTO is available on mouse over.

Ekos Polar Alignment Assistant tool also received a few bug fixes from the community feedback. Most users were able to achieve impressive results using the this easy to use Polar Alignment tool.

While Ekos is designed for ease of use, it can be intimidating for new users unfamiliar with the architecture of Ekos/INDI on several operation systems. Therefore, a new Ekos Profile Wizard is now available to guide the users to setting up their equipment for the first time in Ekos across several operating systems and connection topologies.

With INDI v1.4.1+, figuring out which port to use for your mount & focuser is now trivial across Linux & OSX. INDI automatically scans ports on your system and can even automatically connect to all potential available ports as well until a successful connection is established.

Last, but not least, KStars' NEO (Near-Earth-Object) data query from NASA's JPL is now properly working again thanks to our newest KStars developer Valentin Boettcher. Valentin (aka Hiro) is only 18 years old but is quite brilliant and experienced with KDE/Qt development environment. Welcome abroad!

Sunday, March 19, 2017

USNO NOMAD star catalog which contains ~100 million stars has been available in KStars for many years, but it appears many KStars users do not know how to get the catalog up and running.

The primary problem is its sheer size (1.4 GB) which tends to fail when being downloaded via KStars Download New Data tool. So here is a quick guide on how to obtain this catalog.

USNO NOMAD requires Tycho-2 catalog to be installed first. It is a relatively smaller download at only 32MB and can be safely installed using the Download New Data tool. Using the keyboard, click Ctrl + N to bring up the dialog, or go to Data → Download.

Navigate to Tycho-2 and click Install.

Wait until Tycho-2 is downloaded and installed. Now download the USNO NOMAD Catalog. Please either use a download manager to download the file, or use wget from the console. To use wget, open a console and type:

Alternatively, you might want to checkout the mirror list first to download the files from a mirror close to you. After downloading the file, extract it and copy USNO-NOMAD-1e8.datto ~/.local/share/kstars

Now restart KStars, and go to Settings→ Configure KStars. You'll see the Star Catalogs density slider, move it up and click Apply. You can control how many stars KStars draw on the screen, the more stars, the more resources it would take to render them, so adjust the slider carefully.

And if all goes well, you should have millions of stars on in your KStars Sky Map, enjoy!

Tuesday, February 28, 2017

I'm very excited to announce the release of KStars 2.7.5 for MacOS and Windows!

This is the first official KStars release for MacOS 10.11+, and while we made sure to test it thoroughly, please treat it as a beta release and report any bugs to the KDE bug tracking website.

KStars for MacOS supports all the features of the Linux KStars release, including Ekos and INDI. It comes ready with astrometry.net support, xplanet, and ability to download and install General Star Catalog (GSC) data used for CCD Simulator stars.

Most INDI drivers are imported with the exception of few Linux-specific drivers; we are investigating different approaches to improve INDI 3rd party drivers support under OSX. This release would not have been possible if not for the tireless efforts of KStars developers and INDI forums members.

Specifically, I'd like to thank the following volunteers for their significant contribution to the MacOS release:

Robert Lancaster: KStars latest developer and chief driver of the MacOS release. Robert greatly improved the usability and cross-platform capabilities of KStars while adding several very exciting and useful features to both KStars and Ekos.

Stephane Lucas: Initiated the longest (110+ pages) INDI thread Ekos for OS X that resulted in this release. Stephane carried out extensive testing and suggestions for Ekos Scheduler and aided in the KStars OSX Port.

Jamie Smith: Developed script to automate building of KStars using Craft, CMake, and XCode methods in addition to automating DMG builds.

Many INDI forums users also helped in testing this release, so I'd like to extend my thanks to all our users.

Along with the Mac OS release, a new KStars for Windows 64bit release is also available for download. You can download both release from KStars website.

Friday, February 17, 2017

Glad to announce the release of KStars v2.7.4 for Windows 64bit. This version is built a more recent Qt (5.8) and the latest KF5 frameworks for Windows bringing more features and stability.

This release brings in many bugs fixes, enhancements for limited-resources devices, and improvements, especially to KStars premier astrophotography tool: Ekos. Windows users would be glad to learn that they can now use offline astrometry solver in Windows, thanks to the efforts of the ANSVR Local Astrometry.net solver. The ANSVR mimics the astrometry.net online server on your local computer; thus the internet not required for any astrometry queries.

After installing the ANSVR server and downloading the appropriate index files for your setup, you can simply change the API URL to use the ANSVR server as illustrated below:

In Ekos align module, keep the solver type to Online so it would use the local ANSVR server for all astrometry queries. Then you can use the align module as you would normally do. This release also features the Ekos Polar Alignment Assistant tool, a very easy to use spot-on tool to polar align your mount.

Thursday, February 16, 2017

When setting up a German Equatorial Mount (GEM) for imaging, a critical aspect of capturing long-exposure images is to ensure a proper polar alignment. A GEM mount has two axis: Right Ascension (RA) axis and Declination (DE) axis. Ideally, the RA axis should be aligned with the celestial sphere polar axis. A mount's job is to track the stars motion around the sky, from the moment they rise at the eastern horizon, all the way up across the median, and westward until they set.

In long exposure imaging, a camera is attached to the telescope where the image sensor captures incoming photons from a particular area in the sky. The incident photons have to strike the same photo-site over and over again if we are to gather clear and crisp image. Of course, actual photons do not behave in this way: optics, atmosphere, seeing quality all scatter and refract photons in one way or another. Furthermore, photons do not arrive uniformly but follow a Poisson distribution. For point-like sources like stars, a point spread function describes how photons are spatially distributed across the pixels. Nevertheless, the overall idea we want to keep the source photons hitting the same pixels. Otherwise, we might end up with an image plagued with various trail artifacts.

Since mounts are not perfect, they cannot perfectly keep track of object as it transits across the sky. This can stem from many factors, one of which is the mis-alignment of the mount's Right Ascension axis with respect to the celestial pole axis. Polar alignment removes one of the biggest sources of tracking errors in the mount, but other sources of error still play a factor. If properly aligned, some mounts can track an object for a few minutes with only deviation of 1-2 arcsec RMS.

However, unless you have a fancy top of the line mount, then you'd probably want to use an autoguider to keep the same star locked in the same position over time. Despite all of this, if the axis of the mount is not properly aligned with the celestial pole, then even a mechanically-perfect mount would lose tracking with time. Tracking errors are proportional to the magnitude of the misalignment. It is therefore very important for long exposure imaging to get the mount polar aligned to reduce any residual errors as it spans across the sky.

Several polar-alignment aids exist today, including, but not limited to:

1. Polar scope built-in your mount.
2. Using drift alignment from applications like PHD2.
3. Dedicated hardware like QHY's PoleMaster.
4. Ekos Legacy Polar Alignment tool: You need to take exposure of two different points in the sky to measure the drift and find out polar error in each axis (Altitude & Azimuth)
5. SharpCap Polar Alignment tool.

Out of the above, the easiest to use are probably QHY's PoleMaster and SharpCap's Polar alignment tool. However both software are exclusive to Windows OS only. KStars users have long requested support for an easy to use Polar Alignment helper in Ekos leveraging its astrometry.net backend.

During the last couple of weeks, I worked on developing Ekos Polar Alignment Assistant Tool (PAA). I started with a simple mathematical model consisting of two images rotated by a an arbitrary degree. A sample illustration of this is below:

Given two points, we can calculate the arc length from the rotation angle, and hence the radius. Therefore, it is possible to find two circle solutions that would match this, one of which would be the mount's actual RA axis within the image. Finding out which solution is the correct one turned out to be challenging, and even the mount's own rotation angle cannot be fully trusted. To be able to uniquely draw a circle, you need 3 points. So it was suggested by Gerry Rozema, one of INDI venerable developers, to capture 3 images to uniquely identify the circle without involving a lot of fancy math.

Since it relies on astrometry.net, PAA has more relaxed requirements than other tools making it accessible to more users. You can use your own primary or guide camera, given they have wide-enough FOV for the astrometry solver.

Moreover, the assistant can automatically capture, solve, and even rotate the mount for you. All you have to do is to make the necessary adjustments to your mount.

The new PAA works by capturing and solving three images. It is technically possible to rely on two images only as described above, but three images improves the accuracy of the solution. After capturing each, the mount rotates by a fixed amount and another image is captured and solved.

Since the mount's true RA/DE are resolved by astrometry, we can construct a unique circle from the three centers found in the astrometry solutions. The circle's center is where the mount rotates about (RA Axis) and ideally this point should coincide with the celestial pole. However, if there is a mis-alignment, then Ekos draws a correction vector. This correction vector can be placed anywhere in the image. Next the user refreshes the camera feed and applies correction to the mount's Altitude and Azimuth knobs until the star is located in the designated cross-hair. It's that easy!